AMA co-created with Matter Labs: The endgame of zksync

Author: Ignas, DeFi research; Compiler: Huohuo, Vernacular Blockchain

In the Layer 2 era, what is the significance of Layer 1 is the core issue I discussed with Polygon, Avalanche, Solana and Near team members before.

This time, however, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex, co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs, the team behind the zkSync L2 solution. Unlike my previous guests who came from Layer 1 projects, Alex provided insights from the perspective of a Layer 2 builder.

**So, in the L2 era, what is the significance of L1? **

As we all know, L2 solutions are designed to improve Ethereum’s scalability, boasting faster transaction speeds and reduced fees. This is exactly why the L1 protocol was launched a few years ago, especially when rising Ethereum gas fees almost made it unusable for dApps on the mainnet.

But with L2 becoming increasingly popular, what is the future of L1? Are they on the verge of becoming obsolete, ready to evolve, or do they have qualities that L2 solutions cannot replicate?

In this AMA, we will mainly explore the following questions:

1. Has Ethereum won the competition for L1?

2. How is zkSync Era different from other Layer 2 solutions?

3. What exciting future plans does zkSync have for the community?

4. What is the ultimate plan and vision of zkSync?

1. What is zkSync Era?

zkSync is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution based on zero-knowledge Rollup technology developed by Matter Labs.

Released in June 2020, zkSync 1.0, while lacking smart contract functionality, has reached over $170 million in total value locked (TVL) across major assets such as ETH and USDC. The improved zkSync 2.0 will be launched in October 2022, with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility and support for multiple programming languages, including Solidity.

In February 2023, zkSync 2.0 evolved into "zkSync Era" and was officially launched on the mainnet on March 24, 2023. This launch, along with Polygon zkEVM, marks a major change in the Layer 2 space, increasing competition for Optimistic Rollups.

According to DeFillama, zkSync currently hosts 78 dApps with a total locked value of $128 million. However, the total value transferred to the zkSync Era has reached $409 million (L2Beat data).

Source: L2Beat

zkSync maintains its leadership position in the number of transactions per block, one of the important indicators of on-chain activity.

2. Summary of meeting points

Question 1: In the Layer 2 era, what is the purpose of L1? Do you agree with Sanket (Polygon) that Ethereum has already won the L1 race? Recent news about Celo proposing to transition from a standalone L1 blockchain to Ethereum L2. Does this mean that L2 is the future and that most replacements for L1 will either transition to L2 or disappear entirely?

Alex: There are a few things that only L1 can achieve that are critical to the value blockchains create, notably: decentralization, resilience, and censorship resistance. The role of an L1 is to excel in these areas, and it's obvious to me that no one does this better than Ethereum.

Everything else, including scalability, privacy, and user experience, can and will be addressed by L2, irrelevant to L1 comparisons. So yes, I do think Ethereum has won the L1 race.

Question 2: The zkSync Era is currently receiving a lot of attention. However, before Era, you launched zkSync Lite (formerly zkSync 1.0). What's the difference between the two? Will you continue to develop zkSync Sync and advance its ecosystem, or will you focus primarily on the zkSync Era?

Alex: zkSync Lite is the first fully functional zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum. It is a payment-oriented specific application chain and serves as an important iteration of building a general-purpose ZK stack, which has always been zkSync's ultimate vision and mission (as outlined in the introductory post 5 years ago).

Our focus right now is entirely on Era, working to build a highly scalable Internet of Value using the ZK stack.

Question 3: How is zkSync Era different from other Layer 2 solutions? With the increasing number of zkRollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, etc. and zkRollups like Polygon zkEVM, why would dApps choose to build on zkSync Era instead of any other available L2 solution on the market?

Alex: ZK technology has won: zkEVM is already running on Ethereum mainnet, and optimistic EVM rollups have not yet been able to achieve permissionless fraud proof. The huge advantages of ZK Rollups make optimistic techniques obsolete (at least for EVMs), and the teams building them should make the switch as soon as possible.

Here are the advantages gained from any ZK Rollup (compared to Optimistic Rollup):

1) Trustless security guarantee. The average user may not fully understand the risks associated with fraud proofs, but trustless security guarantees provided by pure mathematics rather than “optimistic on-chain law enforcement” are important to institutions.

**2) Faster local bridging between different chains. ** In a multi-chain world, waiting 7 days for a transaction to complete is ridiculous, so Optimistic Rollup insulates itself from the massive network effects formed by interconnected ZK Rollups.

But the zkSync Era (and our ZK stack in general) is more than just a ZK Rollup. Our architecture is optimized to take full advantage of the superpowers of ZK technology. By far the most important one is the ability to publish state differences instead of transaction inputs. From all existing EVM L2s, zkSync is a ZK Rollup that uses state differences (the only other one is Starknet which is not EVM compatible).

Here's what status differences can do in practice:

**1) Cheap local account abstraction. **zkSync Era is the only L2 with a native account abstraction implementation at the protocol level. This means that any account (including Metamask accounts) can enjoy transactions without gas fees or subsidized by the agreement, can pay fees for any token, and other advantages of AA. But due to state differences, Era also makes AA transactions much cheaper than those on other chains, since expensive inputs (such as custom signatures from biometric signers) do not need to go on-chain.

**2) More efficient oracle machine. **Through state differentiation, oracles can be released on demand with negligible potential cost, possibly updating once every second. Compare this: On Rollup, which publishes transaction inputs, oracles are updated every 20 minutes, with annual fees running into the millions of dollars.

**3) Cheap on-chain privacy. **With state diffing, recursive proofs don't have to go on-chain, so privacy-preserving protocols can remain as cheap as normal transactions.

**4) The voluntary nature of zkPorter. **This will be a fundamental shift in the way blockchain systems operate. Imagine combining ultra-secure ZK Rollup with ultra-cheap sidechains in a seamless interoperable system sharing the same address space.

zkSync Era stands out in the market with unique advantages that make it an attractive option for building dApps.

Question 4: Speaking of Polygon zkEVM, a few weeks ago Polygon tweeted that zkSync copied their code without attribution and made misleading claims about the original work. You responded publicly, refuting the accusations of lack of attribution. What are your thoughts on these accusations, and how do you envision working with or competing with the Polygon team in the future?

Alex: My response provides a thorough answer. Open source is great in certain situations because it enables collaboration even between competitors and accelerates technological evolution, which always benefits the end-user.

Everything we build for zkSync is released under a free and permissive open source license. We're excited to see the Plonky2 team improve upon our RedShift builds, and we're also excited to see others use and contribute to parts of the ZK stack, making them available to all.

Question 5: What plans does zkSync have to excite the community in the future? Are there any big updates or upcoming announcements? We are eager to hear about your major milestones on the roadmap.

Alex: We are in the final stages of fully switching the zkSync Era to Boojum, our new efficient proof system. This will unlock the functionality of the superpower I mentioned earlier:

• More efficient oracle.

• Cheap on-chain privacy.

• zkPorter。

Also, in August and September, there are many very exciting projects that will be launching on the zkSync Era, but I don't want to make announcements about them in advance!

Question 6: What is the final plan and vision of zkSync?

**Alex:**Our vision is a trustless, permissionless, inclusive blockchain technology that dominates and empowers freedom for billions of people. We recently detailed this vision in the ZK Credo Manifesto.

Technically speaking, in order to realize this vision, we need to build what we call a hyper-scalable "Internet of Value" architecture. Think of it this way: Just as the Internet can adapt to arbitrarily high user demands without inherent limitations by adding more servers and data links, a value Internet must be able to adapt to arbitrarily high user demands by adding more servers and data links in a way that does not compromise its fundamental characteristics and values. More computing and storage capacity for unlimited growth.

Just as the entire Internet cannot run on a single data center, the Internet of Value cannot be built solely on a single monolithic chain, no matter how powerful it is. The only realistic path forward is a world of multiple chains, but fast, cheap, trustless connections between any two addresses on any two chains. Technically, the only technology that enables this today is ZK proofs. Here's an in-depth technical explanation of why and how it works.

zkSync's contribution to this ultimate vision is the ZK Stack: an open-source framework for building modular Hyperchains connected by ZK Rollups and validiums, which in turn are connected together by ZK-powered Hyperchains.

Question 7: When will the airdrop be conducted?

**Alex:**Already done! We recently launched our first airdrop project called "Libertus Omnibus" - an experimental NFT project through which we learned a lot and then allowed 179,365 whitelisted community members to mint.